Paying a ridiculous amount of money does not necessarily mean that the purchased device fully satisfies your needs or expectations. When it comes to hardware, the final frontier lies in taking it through a rough test that can be performed with one of the many available benchmark utilities. FurMark is one of them, aimed at stressing out your GPU and CPU to the maximum to unveil its true potential.

Quick deployment and simple interface

Deployment on your system is done incredibly fast and as soon as it finishes, you have the possibility to bring up the main window. It sports a simple, classic design, managing to include all available features.

Predefined or custom test cases

Detected GPUs are displayed in the main window, supporting a maximum of four. You can choose to run several predefined test cases which involve a simple Burn-in test, Burn-in benchmark with higher resolution that runs for 15 minutes, and two more presets.

However, you are able to customize the test case to fully stress out your graphics card. Fullscreen mode can be enabled, a custom resolution set, as well as the level of Anti-aliasing which can go up to 8x.

Informing you of the risks involved

Hitting the “Settings” button brings forth more options. You can enable dynamic background or camera, burn-in, xtreme burn-in and post-fx. To be on the safe side, you can toggle an option to let you know when the GPU reached a custom temperature so you don't literally fry your video card.

Once you are happy with the custom configuration you can run a benchmark using only options you chose. Before the process is put in motion you are prompted by a warning message, advising you to hit “GO” only if you acknowledge the risks of fully stressing out your graphics card.

Share and compare results online

The actual test runs in a separate window with the resolution set before the process is put in motion. It displays highly detailed objects and various info, such FPS, memory usage, core, temperature, GPU usage and several more. Results can be compared online with a large database online to get an idea of how well your card performs in case you think of buying a new one.

In conclusion

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that FurMark is a reliable tool you can use to get a glimpse of your video card's full potential. The interface gets you quickly up and running, while the results can fully provide info you need whether you want to upgrade your system or just want to see how well a new one performs.

FurMark was reviewed by Mircea Dragomir, last updated on December 10th, 2014